Ka Kwan Kevin Chan

Are the global real estate markets contagious

The aim of this paper is to investigate the contagion across real estate markets of four countries: Hong Kong, China, U.S. and U.K., during the financial tsunami in 2008. We use the Forbes-Rigobon test, the coskewness test and the cokurtosis test. We propose a new cokurtosis test constructed by extending the method of constructing the coskewness test to further higher order moments. It can show additional channels of contagion that other tests fail to show, and hence can provide more information on the direction of contagion, and reflect a more complete picture of the contagion pattern. The coskewness and cokurtosis tests show that contagion exists between the four countries, and the contagion effect is stronger between Hong Kong and China, and between U.S. and U.K. This provides clues for investors on how to diversify their investment to reduce their risk. This paper bridges the gap that previous works on contagion across real estate markets give mixed results, and gives a first insight into the contagion pattern of global real estate markets during the financial tsunami.

The European sovereign debt crisis: contagion across European real estate markets

This paper aims to investigate the contagion across European securitised real estate markets during the European sovereign debt crisis by the Forbes–Rigobon test, the coskewness test and the cokurtosis test. The new cokurtosis test is constructed by extending the method of constructing the coskewness test to further higher order moments. The results reveal that the cokurtosis test can show additional channels of contagion of which the other tests fail to show, and hence can provide more information on the direction of contagion, and reflect a more complete picture of the contagion pattern. This study has implications to investors and policy-makers. During a crisis, investors should reallocate their portfolio to reduce their loss. Policy-makers should cooperate with other authorities and act accordingly in order to stabilise the economy.

Contagion across real estate and equity markets during European sovereign debt crisis

Standard methods of testing contagion may not work well if the data set is not normally distributed. To cope with this problem, Hatemi-J and Hacker (2005) proposed a new case-resampling bootstrap method to test contagion. In this paper, we extend this method to test the parameters in the Forbes-Rigobon multivariate (FRM) test. The new method has the advantage that the bivariate model is extended to a multivariate framework which jointly models and tests all combinations of contagious linkages. We apply our method to investigate contagion across equity and real estate markets of four countries: Greece, U.K., U.S. and Hong Kong, during the European sovereign debt crisis, and compare the result with that by performing the FRM test directly. Two important results are found. Firstly, both tests we use give similar p-values of the coefficients which indicate the significance of contagion. Secondly, for both tests, the contagion pattern in the equity and real estate markets are different. Our study has an implication to investors that they should regularly review their portfolio and be aware of contagion triggered by a crisis. This would help them reduce their loss and is useful in strategic property management.

The critical factors of shopping malls in urban complexes in China

Purpose As the Chinese Government is planning to transform the economy from an export-oriented economy into a consumption-oriented economy, the impact of Chinese consumers to the economy will become more and more important. However, there is a lack of literature on Chinese consumers’ behavior and the critical factors of shopping malls in China. Hence, this study aims to determine the critical factors of a shopping mall in an urban complex in China from customers’ perspective, using Nanjing Wanda Plaza as an example for our case study. Design/methodology/approach This study carries out ranking analysis and factor analysis to determine the critical factors of the shopping mall. Then cluster analysis is applied to divide the customers into three segments, showing the importance of each factor to different customer segments. Furthermore, correspondence analysis is conducted to investigate the relationship between customer segments and customer characteristics (gender, occupation, age and income). This method can show how customer characteristics affect the critical factors of the shopping mall. Findings Sensual enjoyable shoppers consider the “soft factors” to be superior to the “hard factors”, whereas the pragmatic shoppers are just the opposite. Originality/value This study can serve as a useful reference for developers in designing shopping malls in urban complexes to attract more customers.

A new time-dependent trading strategy for securitized real estate and equity indices

The “buy-and-hold” strategy based on the EMH has been adopted by many investors for long. However, the global financial crisis in 2008 caused more doubt to be cast on EMH. Therefore, many scholars have attempted to create a trading strategy which can outperform the “buy-and-hold” strategy. In this study, we use the Shiryaev-Zhou index to derive a new generalized time-dependent strategy of which the moving-window size can be changed to see how the moving-window size affects the resulting profit of our strategy. We test our strategy on the securitized real estate and general equity indices of six economies, and find the optimal moving-window size for our strategy on each stock index. The results show that when the optimal moving-window size is used, our strategy outperforms the “buy-and-hold” strategy for most cases. Furthermore, during stock market downturns, it’s advisable to adopt our strategy, preferably with larger moving-window sizes, to prevent losses when the stock prices fall rapidly. However, during long periods of booms, it’s better to adhere to the “buy-and-hold” strategy. This implies that we should switch strategies when market fundamentals changes significantly. Property practitioners can also apply this strategy for a better portfolio management to increase their profit. First published online 29 September 2017

Does EVA truly reflect the performance of property companies in China

This study investigates the economic value added (EVA) of 18 major Chinese property companies from 2006 to 2012. We categorize the companies in two ways: 1) companies concentrating on property vs multi-functional companies and 2) state-owned enterprises (SOEs) vs privately-owned enterprises (POEs). We find that on average, the mainland property companies experienced a negative EVA during the period 2006-2012. This is due to the companies undertaking long-term projects, and the companies do not recognize capital gain from property appreciation as income. Hence the EVA of the companies is, in fact, understated. The results also reveal that POEs outperform SOEs in terms of EVA. This reflects the inefficiency of SOEs. This research has two important implications to investors. Firstly, besides looking at the EVA of the companies, investors should also understand the nature of businesses of the companies thoroughly. Secondly, investors investing in emerging markets like China should have a thorough understanding of their market characteristics. This study can act as a reference for future studies in EVA of property companies in other emerging economies in the world.